usermanagement

I am building a news website, but would like to make sure that the journalists are not writing the same articles at the same time. How can i avoid this?
At my old website (not drupal), i made a text box for the journalist to fill in with a short description of the article he was going to write befre being let onto the creation page. In the meantime, other journalist could see in content list that an article was already in process of being written.

Any suggestions?